Extreme makeover: Cleveland, Tennessee edition.
This year, the newly established Smart Communities Initiative plans to address over 15 locally proposed projects in Cleveland ranging from historical building renovations to constructing a temporary downtown ice skating rink.
Created by the Office of the Provost last year, SCI is a senior design course for undergraduate and graduate UT students to apply their individual skills and studies through service learning projects. Students participating will be paired with Cleveland representatives to facilitate the most efficient solutions to the various proposed projects aimed at revitalizing the East Tennessee community.
Brad Collett, professor in SCI’s graduate landscape architecture program, said this is an opportunity for students and cities to partner for mutual gain.
“We have interest and capacity, you have needs and projects,” Collett said. “We can marry those two.”
Cleveland, the 14th largest city in Tennessee and home to over 40,000 residents, was chosen over several competing locations by the SCI committee as the first host-city for the SCI 2014-2015 pilot year.
Without outside help, small cities often struggle to revamp their communities, Collett said. With available resources and talented students, UT can offer Cleveland unique assistance.
“(Communities) either don’t have the expertise or the capital resources to go out and get the consulting in order to get those projects unstuck and moving forward,” he said.
Collett hopes the town will be aided financially and aesthetically as students re-purpose the center city district. Many buildings in the center, downtown area are abandoned, presenting the student participants with a task both “spacially and economically” challenging.
Jenny Retherford, a professor in civil and environmental engineering, recognized Cleveland as a community laden with “a lot of work but little resources” that stands to benefit tremendously in its partnership with UT. She said SCI offers a rare opportunity for students to test their skills outside of a university environment.
“You’re sort of trained in this academic world to have a book that tells you something, or to have all these resources or a professor,” Retherford said. “This is an opportunity for those students to see how those calculations on paper are implemented in the real world.”
While some remain hesitant to accept the ideas students offer, Collett believes that the path to progress lies in society’s good faith in its younger population.
“So often, some people want to discount what they might get from a student as not based in reality,” Collett said. “We have to challenge that sometimes. To think outside the box and come up with creative and new ideas. Because so often, doing things the way they’ve always been done isn’t working.”
